Kenneth Ross

Kenneth Ross wrote his first program on an IBM 1401 in 1962 and played Spacewar! on the PDP-1 as a student at MIT, where he earned his B.S. He later received his MBA from Stanford University. In 1972 he founded Ross Systems, which began by selling programming and systems-analysis services, moved into time-sharing on a DEC PDP-11/70 in 1976 with financial planning and budgeting software, and became a pioneer of financial software on the DEC platform before shifting to packaged software in the 1980s.

Over his career Ross has worked with more than 25 companies as a founder, CEO, board member, venture capitalist, and consultant. Beyond Ross Systems, he went on to found or serve as CEO of Documentum, Pillar, Extricity, and Seriosity, and he founded ExpertCEO, a private online community for CEOs and other senior executives. As a General Partner at RRE Ventures, he headed the firm's Silicon Valley office. He has advised, coached, and invested in early and mid-stage technology firms with an emphasis on B2B and enterprise software, among them mscripts, Adaptive Insights, Savvion, Electric Cloud, and Reciprocity. He is currently Chairman of MedaSystems, an enterprise software company that enables pharmaceutical manufacturers to run expanded access, post-trial access, and investigator-initiated studies, and he is a Trustee of the IT History Society.